Articles

Continuous operation tests find important bugs, partly as a result of their long operation and partly by increasing the probability of finding statistical bugs. However, CO tests have their own downsides. Mandating a periodic reset or reboot can work around these issues, as well as save time and cost for testing, reproduction, debugging, and fix verification.

Many organizations have problems with consistently tracking and measuring system outages. Issues aren't logged, admins make changes to systems without going through change management, and a high number of issues turn out to be recurring problems. Implementing a performance measurement process calculates system reliability and can help you improve consistency.

Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability.

DevSecOps is a growing movement to incorporate security into DevOps practices in order to ensure flaws and weaknesses are exposed early on through monitoring, assessment, and analysis, so remediation can be implemented far earlier than traditional efforts. By failing fast with security testing, organizations reduce risk of a security incident and decrease the cost of rework.

Better Software Magazine Articles

By incorporating performance testing early in a project lifecycle, software projects have a better chance to reach better quality and meet customer expectations. Baljeet Bilkhu shows the value of early performance testing.

To complement functional validation, software teams are expected to validate performance. But, according to Jun Zhuang, you must be prepared to invest time, personnel, and resources to benefit from performance testing.

Probably one of the most frustrating roles a manager has to master is how to know the true status of work being performed. To a developer, completing 80 percent of the work may be good enough, but is it even close to being really done? Masha Nehme shows techniques you can use to verify task completion.

The cloud and the rapid migration to mobile devices and the Internet of Things have made traditional software licensing schemes obsolete. Omkar describes new software monetization based on business, pricing models, and usage.

Interviews

In this interview, Andreas Grabner of Dynatrace explains why you need to pay attention to your users' needs when you're doing your performance testing. He shares his performance testing approaches and explores the top problem patterns that you can learn to spot in your apps.

Scott Barber is the chief performance evangelist for SmartBear and an author of several books, including Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications. In this interview, Scott chats about useful test metrics, communication, and the problem with performance testing programs.

Conference Presentations

Managing the quality and performance of complex systems requires more than simply executing test cases and running load tests. You need to perform careful analysis of test results and production metrics. The sheer amount of data generated in production and testing makes analysis a huge challenge that is often left wanting. With the magic of machine learning (ML) and the application of data science techniques, you have the opportunity to derive valuable and actionable information from big data. Gopal Brugalette shares the basic concepts behind ML, covering clustering, classification, and predictive analysis. He shows you how to implement algorithms using open source tools and languages like Python and R.

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate...

A hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the...

As organizations embrace agile and DevOps delivery models, non-functional performance testing becomes a challenge. While functional validation continues to mature in Agile, many organizations are either struggling to integrate application performance into the delivery model or are...

Women Who Test connects women software professionals around the world – allowing them to share testing ideas and solutions while helping each other thrive and advance their careers.

The community is an ever-expanding group of engaged, and encouraging women who are stepping up to start meet-ups and create local chapters. Explore the existing local chapters and consider sharing and joining! WomenWhoTest.com